Intercultural Communication: A Practical Guide

Successfully communicating with people from another culture requires learning more than just their language. While fumbling a word or phrase may cause embarrassment, breaking the unspoken cultural rules that govern personal interactions can spell disaster for businesspeople, travelers, and indeed anyone who communicates across cultural boundaries. To help you avoid such damaging gaffes, Tracy Novinger has compiled this authoritative, practical guide for deciphering and following the rules that govern cultures, demonstrating how these rules apply to the communication issues that exist between the United States and Mexico. Novinger begins by explaining how a major proportion of communication within a culture occurs nonverbally through behavior and manners, shared attitudes, common expectations, and so on. Then, using real-life examples and anecdotes, she pinpoints the commonly occurring obstacles to communication that can arise when cultures differ in their communication techniques. She shows how these obstacles come into play in contacts between the U.S. and Mexico and demonstrates that mastering the unspoken rules of Mexican culture is a key to cementing business and social relationships. Novinger concludes with nine effective, reliable principles for successfully communicating across cultures.

Author: Tracy Novinger
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 03/01/2001
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 9.00h x 5.97w x 0.65d
ISBN: 9780292755710

Review Citation(s):
Univ PR Books for Public Libry 01/01/2002 pg. 13 - Strongly Recommended

About the Author
A real estate investment professional currently residing in Austin, Texas, Tracy Novinger writes from extensive research and her personal experiences of living and working in cultures as diverse as Aruba and Tahiti. She was born in the Caribbean, studied